


Saying It's Just Another Day

by DGCatAniSiri



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-03-09
Packaged: 2019-11-14 07:32:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18048269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DGCatAniSiri/pseuds/DGCatAniSiri
Summary: Nate's feeling melancholy. Danse tries to help.





	Saying It's Just Another Day

**Author's Note:**

> This is an AU where the Sole Survivor never went searching for Shaun. I'm not sure how all the details work, since I was focused on the conversation happening, not the full history, but the important thing is that he and Danse still ended up together, Danse still learned the truth about his origin, was kicked out of the Brotherhood, and that the Sole Survivor never went after the Institute. 
> 
> Title comes from "[Unhappy Anniversary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_5qdWPvVUs)" by Vitamin C.

“Danse? Am I a bad person?”

Danse didn’t know how to process the question from his lover. Nate was many things – the Sole Survivor of Vault 111, the General of the Minutemen, a beacon of light in the darkness that was the Commonwealth, the Great American Wasteland. How he could think that somehow made him a bad person... Danse couldn’t even begin to imagine.

“Why would you think that?” Danse asked. He could have immediately gone into some long spiel of the great things that he’d done in the last year, but... Something had triggered this melancholic statement.

Nate sighed, leaning back against the makeshift headboard of their bed. He glanced out the window, looking out at the moonlight shining down on the settlement he’d led the building of in Sanctuary Hills. Specifically, he was looking out to a patch of land that he’d managed to leave empty since tearing down the old structure, recycling the material for other purposes around the settlement. It had been the site of his home before the Vault. Before the bombs.

The one he’d shared with his wife. With their son. Before the war.

Cryogenic suspension was something that Danse knew pretty much solely from a theoretical perspective, and even that had always strained his credibility. At least, before the Sole Survivor of Vault 111 had shown up at the police department and saved his ass.

And then... Things had been a whirlwind since then, leading to Danse finding out that he was one of the Institute’s synths, and Nate defending him against Elder Maxxon. The Brotherhood of Steel would never accept Danse among their numbers again, but... He’d been given a chance to live, because of Nate.

Nate had defended Danse, despite his oaths to the Brotherhood. And, as he’d seen, through the building of this community, with the help of his companions, which included a robot, another synth, and a ghoul, the Brotherhood was... flawed. The union of various people who lived in the Commonwealth, developing this place – not just Sanctuary Hills, but various places across the land, from Diamond City to the edges of the Glowing Sea – had shown him that there was value in the various offshoots of humanity, the synths, the ghouls... Okay, maybe the super mutants weren’t entirely worth it, but then, neither were the Raiders, and they were wholly human, so...

The community that Nate had developed had made him reconsider old beliefs. And he could never consider Nate as anything other than one of if not THE best man he’d ever known.

Yet, as he could clearly tell, with the question, the uncertain stare at the empty space of his former house... Nate wasn’t so certain.

“It’s been a year,” Nate finally said. “A year since I woke up in that Vault. A year since... since I left my wife’s body in that refrigerator and... And I haven’t tried to live up to the promise I made of... of finding our son.” He sighed, dropping his head, looking away from the site of his former home. “I abandoned Shaun, let him go, and... My first thought when I saw her body was to promise that I’d find our son, but... By the time that I really understood the vast expanse of the Commonwealth alone... Finding him seemed impossible. I didn’t know where to start, why anyone would take him... I gave up. I just... I let him go. I let my son go. I just... gave up.”

Damn. Danse had dealt with the existential crisis of learning that he wasn’t human (a voice in the back of his head reminded him that, Brotherhood propaganda be damned, that was no crime, and it carried Nate’s gentle tease). But this... This was guilt. Guilt had its own rules. And if there was one thing the Brotherhood had never encouraged for anyone, it was feeling guilty – if you did the job, then that’s all that mattered. If you didn’t do the job, you were punished for your failure. Either way, things were binary on that front. But this was a different kind of guilt.

He wasn’t sure what to say, and his normal reaction under those circumstances was to simply not say anything. But he knew that wasn’t the right way to handle this. Nate was hurting, and he needed someone. He needed him, the man he’d fallen in love with in the time since emerging from the Vault. 

“What could you do, really? What... what would you have had to do, in order to find one child in all the Wasteland?” Danse asked, hoping that he wasn’t just making Nate feel worse, reiterating the same arguments that he’d used to talk himself out of his search.

“I don’t know. But... I didn’t even try. I made it into the Wasteland, and then... the enormity of even trying to find Shaun, to figure out where the people who’d kidnapped him had gone... I mean, I was stuck in a big freezer when they took him. What if, for me, it was moments, but for Shaun it was days, or weeks... God, what if he’d been taken years ago? He’d have been raised as someone who... didn’t even know me.”

“You’re right,” Danse said. He placed a hand on Nate’s shoulder, trying to offer some tactile contact, something to keep him grounded in reality, the world that they lived in of fighting for everything that they had. “It’d be... virtually impossible to find him if that were the case. There’s no reason to believe that these kidnappers would have stayed in the Commonwealth.” Danse knew of branches of the Brotherhood of Steel in the Capital Wasteland or the Mojave, across the continent, and knew just what the distance was between them and the core Brotherhood faction. Theoretically, someone could wander the land and try to hunt down two kidnappers and a stolen child, but in the time it took to journey between locations – to say nothing of the general hazards of the Wasteland, the deathclaws, the radscorpions, the super mutants, the feral ghouls, and who knew what else was lurking in the depths of the irradiated areas of the Wastes.

It seemed, though, that Nate seemed determined to berate himself for failing to follow a promise he’d made to his wife. “Still. I looked out at the Wasteland, I... I stumbled my way to my old home, found Cogsworth... And then I just shut down for... I don’t know how long. Everything I knew was just gone. The people, the places... I didn’t know what I was going to do. And... I could have taken that time to-”

“Nate. Stop.” Danse surprised himself with the interruption, unable to take Nate beating himself up like this any further. “Nate, you could have searched the Commonwealth from top to bottom, and what if you didn’t find any trace of Shaun? Had no idea where to take the next step?”

“At least I would have tried, though.”

“Nate. You made a choice – find a child that could be anywhere, could even have been able to grow up without you, or focus on yourself. On surviving in the new world that you had found yourself in. You could have gone on a fruitless search that might have never yielded results, or even just given into despair. Instead, you set about making a corner of the world that was a place where we could rebuild. Or do you think that people like Garvey, Piper, MacCready... even that ghoul, Hancock, would have come together like they have on their own?”

It didn’t elicit an immediate protest from Nate, which Danse would consider a solid point in his favor. At least Nate was listening to him. That was the first step, above the rest of trying to get him out of this.

So he continued. “Nate... What could you do? There’s a massive world out there, full of dangers that could have killed you. Would your wife have wanted you to get yourself killed chasing down false leads that might never have led you to him? There’s...” He sighed – he knew it was the truth, but to put it so bluntly was also going to just be asking for Nate to take it poorly. But if he didn’t say it bluntly, it’d just linger, so... “You made a grief-stricken and fevered promise to a dead woman after stumbling out of a cryogenic pod. You had no idea what you would need to do to make it happen, if you even could. You still thought about the world that you’d be walking out into as the world before the bombs dropped. That... How easy would it have been to find Shaun then?”

“There were... authorities. Organizations. Police, FBI... groups dedicated to tracking... lost people across the nation.”

“Groups and organizations that don’t exist in the Wasteland. You’d have just been some... lone wanderer, a vault dweller who’d crawled out of the rubble. No one would have felt any obligation to help you, a total stranger.” Danse smiled, pressing a gentle kiss to the inside of Nate’s neck. “The fact that you would... That’s part of what I love about you.”

For a moment, Nate was quiet, thinking. “Danse... Do you think that I was... just replacing my wife with you? That you’re just... a rebound for me?”

Oh. Oh. This was more that just some unfulfilled promise, then. That was an issue, to be sure, but... The idea that he’d moved on too quickly...

“Nate. You stood against Elder Maxxon in my defense. Even knowing that I’m a synth, you stood up for me, and you pushed to get past my barriers... To tell me that I was human enough for you. That doesn’t say ‘rebound’ to me.” Danse paused again. “But you’re concerned that we began our relationship before you’d fully managed to come to terms with your wife’s death?”

Nate was silent for a long couple of minutes, organizing his thoughts. He couldn’t meet Danse’s eyes as he finally pulled together an answer. “Nora was... I think what hurts is that it never felt right. Between the war and the fact that... we were still pretty young, and then Shaun... We were trying to make it work, but it just... It wasn’t really going to. Not because... We just weren’t...” 

Danse understood – pre-war stories didn’t frequently involve people of the same sex in romantic relationships. In the Wasteland, of course, people found and took love – or just sex – wherever they found it. Considering that the Wasteland included people who’d have sex with ghouls or even found alternative uses for Mister Handy bots... Well, judgement wasn’t exactly something that most had the room for. But there were plenty of isolated pockets who talked ‘breeding programs.’ Some in the Brotherhood had discussed it, and there were rumors that certain splinter factions had grown so insular that they didn’t admit anyone not born into the Brotherhood into their ranks. 

“You married because it was expected. Because it was what people did then.”

“Yeah.” Nate sighed. “It’s not that I didn’t... I cared about her. Just... Not like a husband should his wife. And then... She was killed, and... Finding our son was... It seemed like the one thing that I could do that...” He trailed off, sighing again as he seemed to think over what he’d just said, probably, Danse figured, the first time he’d ever said this out loud. 

He didn’t know what to say to that. It was hard to think of anything that he could say to that. But he had to say something, just to try and help him process all of this. 

“Nate... You aren’t betraying her by... moving on. And you didn’t abandon Shaun. You brought it up yourself, what if you’d been refrozen after they killed her and took him? He wouldn’t know you, if he’s even alive. Even if it was only a short time, you might have biologically been his father, but... You wouldn’t have raised him. You wouldn’t be who he’d think of as his father.” Danse knew it sounded callous, saying that Nate was right to give up on his son, but... To say anything else, he’d only make things worse. At least this, cold and hard as it was, was the truth.

Something about his words made something else click for Danse. “And Nate? You’ve made it clear already that... biology isn’t what defines us.” He reached out, twining their fingers together and squeezing his lover’s hand. “I’m not human, not biologically. But you treat me like one. So if you found Shaun, ten years old, twenty, thirty... older than you, even... Would you really be able to look at him and see your son, or would you see an individual, separate from whatever hopes and dreams you had for who your son would be? Would he look at you and see a missing father, someone kept from him for years of his life, or would he just see another Wasteland stranger?”

That seemed to hit home for Nate, made him consider it. He took a shuddering breath, as if he were coming to a realization. “You’re right. If Shaun’s out there... Even if I could find some way to find him... I wouldn’t know him. Because... there really is no way that there wasn’t some gap between when he was taken and... and I got out.” The fact that he’d run into so many radroaches on his way from his cryo pod to the surface lift seemed a guarantee of that fact – the goons who’d taken Shaun surely would have had no patience for leaving any of the mutated bugs in their path. So there had to have been some significant time between the two times he’d woken up. 

His promise to Nora... It was one that he’d never had a chance at keeping. 

“Would she want you to carry the guilt of not being able to find him for the rest of your life?” Danse asked. “Or would she want you to find your happiness where you could, be able to build a life that you could be proud of, be happy with, in the world you’d woken up in?”

“It’s not that I don’t know that. I know that she would understand... At least, I hope she would. I want to say she would...” Nate stopped that line of thought, knowing that it was another chain of bad thoughts that went in the wrong direction. “I just... still feel like I’ve failed.”

A beat, then... “If you have, what then? How do you deal with that failure and move on from here? Because... You can’t change things at this point. You’ve made your choice, and you have good reasons for why you made it. You know it’s not that you just gave up. You recognized that there was more to this than simply trying to keep an impossible promise. You instead built a new life. You’re not forgetting about the old one, just... letting it be the foundation for the new one. Because people do fail sometimes. Are you going to wallow in that failure, or use it to move forward?”

Nate stared at Danse for a moment, then broke into a grin and leaned against him. “Danse... Thank you. For being here. Talking me out of this. I’m glad you’re here.”

“I owe that to you, you know. Because you ARE a good man. A man I’m proud to love. You haven’t failed me. You could only do that by... letting yourself become consumed by grief. By letting yourself focus on what you’ve not been able to do. Because you’ve led these communities into a position where they might actually be able to rebuild something worth calling civilization. I never realized before how much humanity needs... builders. And that’s what you’ve been doing, helping us – the settlements, these communities, the Commonwealth... to build.”

Nate curled closer to Danse, the two leaning down on the bed, as if at this point, they could bring themselves to sleep, with all of this aired out at last. 

And, Nate began to think, if he couldn’t be a father to the son he’d lost, maybe he could be something of a... guiding hand for humanity going forward. Not a father, that was too grandiose an ideal for any single person, but... someone who offered a vision of the future, and a path forward.

Because finding Shaun might have been something beyond his ability. But helping humanity move forward, despite the chaos and confusion that it had been mired in since the bombs had fallen? That was a legacy that he could be proud to leave behind.

As Nate closed his eyes, he seemed to be ready and willing to lay his ghosts to rest.

**Author's Note:**

> Full disclosure, I've never actually finished a run of Fallout 4. I hit up on the wall of the search for Shaun and how even before I read about him being Father and an old man, I picked up on the idea of how "the re-freeze means that it's probably been years or decades, if Shaun's alive, he's probably lived years of his life, going after him seems kinda futile." So I've only seen various walkthroughs on YouTube about the rest of the game. So if there's some OOCness for Danse happening, my apologies.


End file.
